“When I knew it was over was when I downloaded Skype.”
All the way back in 2003, Michael Powell, then the chairman of the FCC and the United States’ chief regulator of the telecom industry, told a roomful of academics and executives at the University of California at San Diego that he had seen the future of communication. “When the inventors of Kazaa are distributing, for free, a little program that you can talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic and it’s free, it’s over. You can pretend it’s not. You can fight these fights. But it is over. The world will change now inevitably.”
Powell was right. The world did change, and it changed in Skype’s image. Then it left Skype behind.
On Monday, Microsoft shut Skype down for good, a few days short of 14 years after buying the service for $8.5 billion. Skype still had users until the bitter end, but both Microsoft and the world had more or less moved on. Microsoft has shifted all its investment to Teams, a corporate-focused app that the company swears will someday catch on with regular people. Zoom and Meet and countless other apps do video chat perfectly well. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and dozens of other messaging services offer high-quality video and audio in addition to text. The technology that made Skype special two decades ago is now utterly commoditized, and maybe the world just no longer needed the company that made it all possible.
I would happily trade most of what’s available in modern messaging apps for the Skype feature set circa about 2007
But before it goes offline for good, let’s just quickly give Skype its due. No company before or since has had an idea about communication as fundamentally correct as Skype: that what the internet needed was an all-in-one communication system. With Skype, you could call other Skype users, obviously. But you could also call anyone with a phone number. You often had to pay for it, but still: that idea alone remains the most ambitious thing anyone’s ever done in internet chat. Skype’s founders understood that they weren’t building a platform — they were building a global communication system.
I would happily trade most of what’s available in modern messaging apps for the Skype feature set circa about 2007. You could make high-quality calls over voice and video, to practically anyone anywhere on the planet. You could send instant messages to other Skype users, or SMS messages to anyone with a phone. Your Skype account had an answering machine, so people could leave you messages. With Skypecasts, you could have up to 100 people in a single moderated call. Skype was available on every platform that mattered, and its quality was unbeatable.
At its peak, Skype was enormous. In 2009, The New York Times reported the app had 405 million users, and accounted for 8 percent of all the world’s international calling minutes. Skype was a verb! You didn’t call someone from your laptop, you Skyped them. And its ringtone remains one of the most iconic internet sounds of all time.
Ultimately, it seems that what killed Skype was the very thing that made it so powerful all those years ago: its peer-to-peer technology, borrowed from the file-sharing platform Kazaa (its founders previous startup), that connected users directly to each other instead of hosting everything on the internet. This made it vastly easier and cheaper to scale the service when bandwidth was still hugely expensive, but caused trouble over time. Only a few people truly understood how it worked, one early Skype employee told me, and as Skype was growing there was hardly any incentive to re-architect the whole system. After a while, the system became so specialized, and tuned to so many edge cases, that it began to collapse under its own weight. Pivoting Skype to an internet-based system, which Microsoft eventually did, was a huge amount of work.
Skype’s outdated tech became a particular problem when mobile platforms became dominant. It both obviated some of Skype’s coolest features — I now have a thousand different ways to ping your phone, with or without your phone number — and killed some of the appeal of the peer-to-peer tech. P2P requires devices to be always on and always connected; the way mobile phones are architected just doesn’t allow an app to stay awake all the time. And that’s not even counting all the vagaries of mobile networks around the world.
Skype turned into a knockoff of a bunch of better social apps
At the same time, though, Microsoft didn’t always help Skype’s chances. For a while, Microsoft appeared all-in: the company already had a popular messaging service, Windows Live Messenger, but retired that in 2012 to focus on Skype. But then, “Instead of refining the product, the focus shifted to cramming in features and maximizing the number of users Microsoft could pull in,” Bartosz Jaworski, a former product manager at Skype, wrote in a blog post after the shutdown was announced. Microsoft added a bunch of features nobody really cared about, inexplicably created a new app called Skype Qik, and launched a full redesign that went over so badly Microsoft had to redesign it again a year later.
After a while, the app that had once been so far in front of its competition turned into a knockoff of a bunch of better social apps. By 2016, when Teams launched, it became obvious that Microsoft would focus more on its business-friendly brand than its renegade consumer platform. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, Skype’s user numbers jumped, but Zoom took its place as the video-chat app of choice. That was Skype’s last chance to stay relevant, and probably the last nail in its coffin. Microsoft has little use for a free consumer chat app, and none for a second-tier one. The business of consumer chat is a tough one — it might not even exist, at least on its own — and so eventually everything goes commercial.
What we’re stuck with now is just a bunch of platforms. Zoom is trying desperately to become Microsoft Office; Google Meet and Microsoft Teams are just features inside their companies’ larger work platforms. WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and the rest are closed ecosystems. Your phone number has become a sort of universal username, but it still means we’re all stuck with a dozen chat apps on our phone just to talk with our friends. And sure, if you want the lowest possible quality and worst possible feature set, you can always make phone calls and send text messages. Apple’s iMessage system is probably the closest thing to a spiritual Skype successor in terms of its ability to work with lots of technologies, but that comes with plenty of its own problems and lock-in issues.
All those years ago, Skype was right: we don’t need another social platform or suite of work apps. We need a new layer for communication on the internet. We need something that operates between apps and devices, that doesn’t care where you’ve registered an account. We need something that doesn’t force us to put all our trust in a company that has quarterly results to worry about. What I’m describing is probably a terrible business, and a force for good on the internet. Skype was ultimately very much both those things. I stopped using it years ago, but I’ll miss it anyway.
